Elon Musk: posted a tweet seeking people for the autopilot team, which led to the hiring of Ashok Elluswamy, who is currently Tesla‘s director of Autopilot Software. Elluswamy has eight years of experience with the organization. Based on his LinkedIn profile, the Tesla worker is a robotics engineer with expertise in computer vision and sensing through planning and control. He graduated from the College of Engineering, Guindy in Chennai with a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Electronics and Communication.
Academic Foundation at Carnegie Mellon University
In the United States, he attended Carnegie Mellon University to study robotics systems development. He was connected to Volkswagen and WABCO Vehicle Control Systems before to joining Tesla. Elluswamy began employment with Tesla in January 2014, first working as an autopilot software developer. In 2019, he was elevated to the position of director of Autopilot Software.
Recently Ashok Elluswam posted a Tweet. He wrote, “elonmusk has been the key driver of AI and autonomy at Tesla. He has always pushed us to achieve great things, even when such ideas were seemingly impossible at the time.” He added, “Back in 2014, Autopilot started on a ridiculously tiny computer that only had ~384 KB of memory and puny compute (didn’t even have native floating point arithmetic). He asked the engineering team to implement lane keeping, lane changing, longitudinal control for vehicles, curvature, etc.”
“Many, even in the team, thought that the request was crazy. Nonetheless, he never gave up and pushed the team to achieve this very difficult goal. In 2015, beyond all odds, Tesla shipped the world’s first Autopilot system. The second closest such product only came to market many years later,” he wrote.
Developing In-House Computer Vision
Ashok Elluswam said, “In 2016, Tesla started doing all of the computer vision required for Autopilot in-house instead of depending on external vendors. Many people thought it was insane to bet the product on developing the vision system from scratch within a few months, which had taken other companies a decade or more. Yet, we achieved this target within eleven months. This was a strategically important move that started the development of a strong AI team at Tesla.”
On this Elon musk replied,”Thanks Ashok! Ashok was the first person to join the Tesla AI/Autopilot team and ultimately rose to lead all AI/Autopilot software. Without him and our awesome team, we would just be another car company looking for an autonomy supplier that doesn’t exist. Btw, I never suggested that he say anything and I had no idea he wrote this until I saw it 10 mins ago.”